Stepped out of the desolate domain.

Author / Modern Middle Class

Source / Modern Middle Class

(ID: modernstory)

One

In the summer of 2010, Zhang Yiming smiled shyly, leaving that classic photo.

He posted the photo on Weibo, saying he wanted to change his phone, but the iPhone 4 was too expensive, hesitating in between.

He was 27 years old that year, starting a business called Jiu Jiu Fang, as the summer heat rolled northward along Zhichun Road below his company, with the Sohu and Netease buildings standing like giants in the heat wave.

The Wudaokou subway station nearby saw crowds during peak hours like a black tide, standing still like a reef in the sea.

That year, he attended the China Internet Conference, squeezed among the crowd at the bottom of the stage.

Hundreds of webmasters were interviewed, each with a hundred or so words; the portals collectively referred to them as "grassroots webmasters."

During his interview, Zhang Yiming tried to say something different, mentioning the newly popularized smartphones, "I hope users, whether using a computer or mobile phone to find a house, will quickly associate it with Jiu Jiu Fang."

He had high hopes for this startup and wrote on Weibo at the launch, "The landscape should be seen far and wide; the past cannot be recalled, but the future can still be pursued."

As the new business thrived, he felt subtly dissatisfied, thinking it was a "slow year," and that it should be more aggressive.

He often contemplated at his workstation and listed a plan for relearning on Weibo: how to read, how to write, how to communicate, how to motivate himself, and so on.

The last "how" was how to be patient.

Wang Xing recommended he read the Japanese entrepreneur Inamori Kazuo; he saw Inamori's book "The Way of Living" at a stall, bought it, and read it. The book stated that living is about cultivating one's soul. He thought it was too abstract.

He preferred another quote: "Working hard and improving oneself is a way of cultivation."

Wang Xing, who provided him with a book list, was also lost that year.

For most of the summer, he stayed in a café, trying to persuade one departing employee after another. In the company hallway, salespeople preparing to jump ship smoked heavily, littering the ground with cigarette butts.

He was a more experienced serial entrepreneur than Zhang Yiming, but his luck had always been lacking.

SchoolNet was sold, ChinaNet faced setbacks, and Fanfo had been shut down for a long time; before the shutdown, he left a final message saying, "Expect everything."

Southern Weekly wrote an article about him titled "The Unluckiest Serial Entrepreneur's History of Defeat."

When he named Meituan, he deliberately chose a name that meant "beautiful reunion," but shortly after its founding, Meituan became embroiled in the fierce group-buying war.

When talent poaching became heated, Wowo.com offered Meituan executives three times the salary and promised a timeline for going public, showcasing stock option gains.

Wang Xing could only persuade each one: we are doing the right thing, and there is still a chance of winning. After his persuasion, a little more than half stayed.

The memory of that summer felt like swimming in a raging sea.

The people who remained had to navigate through the cacophony of huge waves; everywhere, there were group-buying ads on television, on the radio, in subway light boxes, and on bus bodies.

That summer, every Saturday night, Wang Xing shared: starting a business is like riding a roller coaster; today you may be at a low point, but you may rise tomorrow.

That same year, on the other side of the ocean, Stanford University assistant professor Li Feifei was also struggling in the tide.

She launched an obscure project, an image dataset, aiming to collect 20 million images, from violins to sheepdogs, encompassing all things.

She hoped every image could have manual annotations so machines could perhaps understand the real world. She compared this project to the "North Star."

Few were interested in the project, and progress was slow; she once took the project to an industry conference in Miami, originally scheduled for a speech, but upon arrival, she found it was downgraded to a "poster presentation."

To promote the project, she initiated an algorithm competition. However, the number of participants decreased year by year; by 2011, there were only 15 competing algorithms.

Li Feifei said, "Feeling ashamed" was no longer enough to express her emotions at that time:

"I could almost see my North Star dimming gradually, and my path falling into darkness."

At a crossroad with lost sheep, looking around in confusion, during grand times of change, there are always countless paths; often, the test is not judgment, but determination.

In 2010, Liang Wenfeng, a master's graduate from Zhejiang University, went alone to Chengdu.

He rented a less than ten-square-meter room in Chengdu, dim and damp, with only an old desk and a single bed.

He did not look for a job, using his 80,000 savings to study the little-known field of quantitative trading.

The computer case roared, ancient machines calculating, beginning to model and adjust parameters, gambling with the stock market.

That year, Spring Xilu was bustling, and when he occasionally looked up at the sky, it was always chaotic.

Two

In 2011, Jiu Jiu Fang was established for two years, with monthly visits exceeding six million and new investment of five million dollars.

Zhang Yiming launched new technology: aggregating real estate information from various portals and recommending it to interested users.

He vaguely touched that door and sensed a brand-new world beyond it.

He wanted to do content recommendation across the internet, but the real estate app market was limited; thoughts began to grow wildly like weeds, "Should I change to do something else?"

In January, he attended a class reunion, urging his classmates, "Now is the right time to challenge the broader world."

In February, he asked on Weibo, "In the past 10 years, 3 years, or 1 year, what bold things have you done?"

In September, he wrote, "If I could give my past self one piece of advice for the last five years, it would be to be more radical."

In October, he wrote, "I keep thinking about how to make the future more exciting."

In December, he wrote, "Referring to others' opinions is only a clue for judgment, and cannot serve as determination for decisions."

He had made up his mind, found Jiu Jiu Fang investor Wang Qiong, and said that the mobile internet was a very good opportunity, "I always feel that if I don't seize this opportunity in my lifetime, it would be a bit regrettable."

That same year, Wang Xing also made up his mind, not to follow the current, not to chase trends, not to advertise, and to tighten cash flow.

In the frenzy of excitement, it was very difficult to maintain rationality. He and his partner Wang Huiwen went to Shenyang for a meeting, and halfway through, the team interrupted, "Wang, stop fooling us, just tell me when we will advertise; I don’t want to hear anything else."

Similar voices were everywhere, but Wang Xing remained unmoved. He maintained that the noisy heat wave would recede, and maintaining cash flow was the foundation of survival.

In July 2011, Meituan raised $50 million, and Wang Xing revealed his account balance at the press conference, equivalent to 420 million yuan. Shortly afterward, a large number of group-buying websites closed down.

The fog seemed to last indefinitely, but endings always came abruptly.

During the years of persisting in building the image dataset, people often advised Li Feifei: who would annotate tens of millions of images, and how long would it take? Even if completed, how many years to train the model?

Li Feifei had no words to reply; she felt the project might fail, but she firmly believed the overall direction was correct, and as chip development progressed, there would always be someone to solve the problem:

When the whole world, along with all its colors, chaos, and mundanities, pours into our machines' thoughts, everything will change.

There are no destined children of fate, only those who do not believe in fate.

In 2011, a long bear market arrived. The Shanghai Composite Index plummeted 21.68% in a year, with the market evaporating by 5.4 trillion, and despair spread throughout the market.

On October 7, the trading volume in the Shanghai market hit a new low since January 2009.

That October, Liang Wenfeng drove a Fiat, traveling alone in Tibet.

It was a small car worth fifty to sixty thousand and nearly falling apart; Liang referred to it as "the ride."

During his school days, he loved to travel far and had once ridden a bicycle, backpacking through several provinces in East China, traveling by day and sleeping outdoors at night.

On October 19, he reached his first stop, and posted on Weibo using the title of Zheng Jun's song, "Back to Lhasa."

The song was not sad, clear, and calm.

Three

During the 2011 Spring Festival, Wang Xing visited Silicon Valley, where a new world was competing; "they really believe technology will change the world."

After returning, he spoke in different venues, frequently stating, "Any industry that has not been changed by the internet will be changed by the internet."

That year, he worked over 100 hours a week; there was a barbershop downstairs, but he thought haircuts were a waste of time and shaved his head.

The group-buying war soon fell into the dust of history. Looking back years later, he said that war was not made up of struggle and sacrifice but was composed of patience and suffering.

He retweeted a Weibo post, stating that the monk Tang had no seventy-two transformations, but had a persistent thought; facing 81 challenges, he had cried and pleaded, but had never said once, "Let's not pursue scripture and disband everyone."

He said if you have not given up yet, then you have not failed, and are still on the path to success.

On a summer night in 2012, while changing his child's diaper, Li Feifei received a late-night phone call. The call came from Florence, informing her that a special competition entry had emerged.

The voice on the other end hesitated briefly and mentioned the algorithm called neural networks.

Soon, it caused a stir in academia; scholars stated it was "an undisputed turning point in the history of computer vision."

Li Feifei rushed to Florence, sitting quietly on the plane, with only one thought in her mind: history had just been created, and only a few people in the world knew about it.

In that year of contemplation, Zhang Yiming's last Weibo post was, "One must not seek an easy path in pursuing endeavors; only with a strong motivation for success and resilience can one succeed."

During the Spring Festival of 2012, on the seventh day of the new year, he met with Wang Qiong in a café where he sketched out today's Toutiao on a napkin.

After leaving the café, the street was quiet and sparsely populated. He remembered the summer of his first New Year's Day in Longyan, Fujian, during heavy rain, when he first read "The Return of the Condor Heroes."

Outside, the heavy rain was like a curtain, while the world inside the book said life should use a sword to explore far and wide.

This was their odyssey summer. Years later, people discussed the highlights, but often overlooked that summer.

However, that summer may have been the most precious: learning reserves in confusion, adhering to one's heart in wandering, not thinking that the ups and downs in front of you are the end; there is always desolation before the future comes, and the future will arrive faster than imagined.

After reaching Lhasa, Liang Wenfeng drove all the way to Yamdrok Lake, to the banks of the Yarlung Tsangpo River, advancing along the northern foothills of the Himalayas towards Mount Everest, enjoying a view of the small mountains around.

After descending from the snowy mountain, he passed through the Xixabangma Nature Reserve and entered Ali.

At an altitude of 4,500 meters, Ali, known as the roof of the world, has thin air and is desolate with no human presence.

On November 7, 2011, he updated his last Weibo post.

Stuck in a deserted area for a week. Fortunately, I made it out.

But my Fiat didn't make it out. It will forever remain in that endless vast highland pasture.

That's the END.

He stepped out of the desolate domain.

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